Even the act of voting has become a partisan issue with racial implications in 2020.
Republicans are far more likely than Democrats to say they’re willing to vote in person during a pandemic, while Democrats outpace Republicans in wanting to vote by mail, according to new POLITICO/Morning Consult poll, which also shows racial differences as well.
The reasons for the partisan split became clear during Tuesday’s troubled election in Georgia as well as Wisconsin’s controversial April 7 primary. It’s also playing out in federal court cases in battleground states where Democrats are demanding more mail-in voting opportunities while Republicans resist.
The challenge of having an election during a pandemic — and the resulting partisan division over how to do it — poses particular problems for Democrats, however, because of issues of geography and race.
Coronavirus spreads more easily in densely populated urban areas — where Democrats tend to outnumber Republicans — and has proved to be more deadly to African Americans and Hispanics, who vote for Democrats by bigger margins. On top of that one-two punch, the threat of coronavirus has led to precinct closures that load up voters at combined polling stations, often in urban or Democratic areas….
The poll showed that 54 percent of black voters said they would prefer to vote by mail during the pandemic, compared with 28 percent who said they would still go to the polling station in person. By 49 percent to 44 percent, whites would prefer to vote by mail than in person during a pandemic and by 43 percent to 38 percent, Hispanics would prefer in-person to mail-in voting.
Overall, voters favored mail-in voting over in-person voting by 50 percent to 41 percent.
Bob Stein, a political scientist and pollster with Rice University, said there’s been a clear shift in support for mail-in voting among Democratic voters since the coronavirus epidemic began. There has also been a corresponding decrease in support among Republicans. In the midst of conducting a 1,000-sample poll in Houston’s Harris County, Stein said, he saw support for mail-in voting drop 7 percentage points among Republicans who previously had voted by mail when Trump began criticizing mail-in voting.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Stein said.